Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a discharge portion liner attachment structure for a vertical shredder that shreds discarded household electric appliances and the like.
Description of the Related Art
Vertical shredders are used as devices that perform a shredding process for recycling discarded household electric appliances such as a refrigerator that have been collected.
The vertical shredder includes: a rotor that is supported on a rotation shaft rotating about a vertical axis; a cylindrical shell that is disposed on an outer side of the rotor in a radial direction in such a manner as to be concentric with the vertical axis, and has an inner circumference portion on which a shell liner is attached; a breaker that is supported by the rotation shaft above the rotor; a sweeper supported below the rotor in such a manner as to be coaxial with the rotation shaft; a discharge ring disposed on a circumference portion of the sweeper; and a discharge portion through which a shredded material that has been swept out through an opening formed on a circumference wall of the discharge ring by the sweeping operation performed by the sweeper is discharged to the outside.
Japanese Utility Model No. 3059207 (hereinafter, referred to as “Patent Literature 1”) discloses a vertical shredder including a breaker (described as a “knocker” in Patent Literature 1), a rotor, and a sweeper that are rotatable about a vertical axis both in normal and reverse directions. In the vertical shredder, liners are attached to both left and right side surfaces of the breaker and the sweeper, serving as smashing surfaces.
In the vertical shredder, the discharge ring, having discharge ring liners disposed on its inner circumference portion, is disposed on a circumference portion of the sweeper in such a manner as to extend along the rotational trajectory of the sweeper. The shredding target object is swept out through the opening formed on a part of the circumference wall of the discharge ring by the sweeping operation.
The discharge ring disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is provided with an opening formed in such a manner that an angle between both left and right edges of the opening about the rotation shaft is approximately 180°.
When such an opening is employed, sufficient strength to hold heavy components installed above the discharge ring, such as the cylindrical shell, is difficult to achieve. Thus, an additional supporting structure for reinforcement and the like are required. As a result, the structure might be complex and expensive due to the increase in the number of components.
Thus, a configuration may be employed in which the angle between both the left and right edges of the opening about the rotation shaft is set to be smaller than 180°, so that the cylindrical shell and the like can be supported by the discharge ring only and no additional supporting structure is required. Unfortunately, in this configuration, ones of the discharge ring liners close to the opening frequently come into contact with the shredding target object that is swept out through the opening by centrifugal force acting thereon due to the sweeping operation performed by the sweeper, and thus are heavily worn.
Thus, these discharge ring liners need to be frequently replaced. Furthermore, the replacing requires extremely cumbersome maintenance work of removing heavy components such as the rotor disposed above the discharge ring liners.